Get Up, Stand Up! Stand Up for Your Rights!

Via Balloon Juice, it appears that yes, to steal the title of the Juicy post, “John Hindraker is a total idiot.” Presumably no one able to put the letter to the phoneme to the word to the clause to the sentence needed such judgment to be confirmed by the likes of me, but it is awfully fun to type.

You can follow the links to read the poesy. The gist: “One basic question emerging from the midterm election is: to what extent did the terrorists win?” Just one basic question, emerging sui generis from the bubbling, primeval cauldron of The Elections. More accurately phrased, it might read: “One question that I am going to yank out of the results of the midterm elections like a Damned Abortionist yanking a partial-birth baby piece by piece out of its brainwashed liberal mother is . . .” Well, when you’ve got the hind rocket blasting with such force all day, it’s easy to speed by the details.

Arthur Silber finds another gem, here supposing that John Conyers is actively in league with Osama bin Laden, perhaps hoping that when the swarthies with scimitars show up at the gates of Vienna, he will be rewarded for his anti-Western perfidy with a sweet gig as chief eunuch to the Caliph's harem, perhaps even including an occasional kiss or two, Bagoas to the 21st-century Bizarro Alexander.

The dauphin, meanwhile, used his radio address (they still give radio addresses!? And love root beer floats at the soda fountain, and baseball, cracker jacks, and Chuch Yeager, the fastest man in the world) to reassure Americans and the world that although they loved terror before the elections, now that they’re poised to overrun Washinton’s divey-er bedroom communities, The Democrats hate terror just as much as you and me and The Troops®.

From the Democrats, meanwhile, I hear precisely what I predicted, which is a somewhat more tempered bellicosity and, if anything, a more condescending and uncomprehending attitude toward the targets of our Most Excellent Occupation. I made the mistake of listening to NPR today, during a segment of interviews with Demotrons, each programmed to say that America must move forward—toward what? away from whom?—and that Iraqis must now “stand up” and take responsibility for their own democracy, cause, hell, it’s America that’s been doing the heavy lifting over there.

Iraqis did not choose to inherit a rudderless state fraught with horrific violence and cursed with a total absence of civil authority other than a scared, confused, monolingual American military zipping from here to there in skittish convoys and shooting the hell out of anything they don’t understand, which is just about everything. I am an advocate for as swift and soon a withdrawal as possible, but only because the other option is to keep making it worse. To say that we ought to predicate the morning-after walk—dash—of shame on this paternalistic nonsense in which Iraq, having just been handed a bag of flaming shit by the America next door, is counseled to build a castle, is to leap beyond arrogance to lunacy. It is safe to say that most Iraqis remain profoundly ambivalent about Western-style representative government as a concept. To ride into power as the nominally antiwar party all the while hanging on for life and limb to the canard that whatever The Troops® are doing in Iraq is protecting us is contradictory to say the least. To imply that the problem with the Bush Plan for Total and Forever War in Iraq is that it doesn’t adequately empower Iraqis, as the recycled therapy-speech goes, who must “stand up” and “take responsibility,” as if they knocked Humpty off the wall--Well, that, friends, is the definition of audacity.

Democrat or Republican, the problem is the same: they won’t confront the most basic reality, that currently we are the problem. We may never know what Osama bin Laden roots for, if root he does, but we can be sure that whenever an American of any stripe grabs the mic and starts pulling his hair over the failure of this or that Muslim society to drag itself into the modern world, in particular a society already mashed and smashed by American hubris and American bombs, the Saudi Sage is not displeased.

Change It MORE!

Rightly taken to task over the content of this most recent post, I’m going to engage in that grand old blog tradition of walkin’ it back a little, calling it clarification, and writing Hewitt-style “Fuck you, liberal cocksucker!” emails to anyone who has the future temerity to call it inconsistency.

Jim rightly points out that the tone, at very least, of that prior post makes it seem as if the realpolitickers are doing it all out of the goodness of their hearts, occupying foreign lands to sap a resource that the poor schmoes back home need desperately but don’t think about—that so-called realism, in other words, is realistic, at least insofar as it confronts the acquisition of vital resources for a nation of rubes living on fantasy, football, and a few thousand gallons of middle octane every year, the last of whose provenance they think of, if at all, only in the bumper-sticker terms of “Who put our oil under their sand?”—a mindset unfortunately amenable to foreign adventures in Crude Country, at least until the body count begins to rise.

I see on rereading that that’s pretty much the point I made, though not the point I wanted to make. Clumsy, hurried, and full of pique is no way to go through life, son, to paraphrase an old favorite. So, to revise:

There are two trends at work. The first is the American addiction to energy, particularly though not exclusively in the form of personal transportation. We’re a motoring people. We live far from our jobs. With the exception of a few, mostly coastal cities, even our major urban centers are unwalkable, unbussable, unsubwayable, even uncabbable. Even having done some work on urban development, I remain amazed at the total centrality of parking to any development scheme or real estate project. It is the primary consideration: before aesthetics, before traffic flow, before number of units or percentage of retail to residential space—parking.

To some degree, our car addiction is a natural working of the market, although the particular conditions of the market—namely super-cheap fuel—were clearly temporary, and inevitably so, in retrospect. Post-war America was affluent, gas was cheap, land was plentiful, and, of course, the cities were now full of scary brown people making political demands, so off went whitey to his cul-de-sac, his two-car garage, and his half an acre.

But to an equal if not greater degree, the reshaping of the American community to its auto-centric incarnation was one more example of planning gone awry. (Damn you, Eisenhower!) It was the government that built the interstate highway system, the arterial parkways and the bypasses that brought rural land, often former farmland, into the clutches of developers. It was agricultural conglomeration and government subsidy that undercut regional agriculture across the country, depressed rural land values, and made all those Rolling Hill Acres and Heritage Estates and whatever else available to be subdivided and parceled out to the formerly not-so and now newly credit-worthy refugees. These were not livable communities, really. Most of them didn’t—and don’t—even have sidewalks. It was government zoning laws and regulations, crafted in tandem with subsidy-hungry developers, that threw up impediments to mixed-use development and building, which helped grow the strip malls, the big box stores, the endless parking lots, the sprawling exurbs . . . It was, in other words, government intervention as much as private enterprise that created car-dependent America.

Motoring America runs on gas, and motoring America doesn’t like to pay world retail for its fuel.

Now the United States has been mucking around in the Middle East for the last half-century because of a powerful misperception that goes something like this: Arabs are crazy, violent, and probably prone to socialism. Give them a chance and they’ll go Red, and even if they don’t, they’ll use oil against us, jacking up the prices, demanding preferential treatment, impeding the natural global hegemony of this, the greatest nation in the country. Our government has long-praised and little-practiced the market economics it preaches. It is the delusion of our governors, the supposed realists, the dogged and true imperialists, that our access to energy, in particular our cheap access to energy, and certainly our exclusive access, should that every become necessary, depends on our control of the political destinies of Middle-Eastern states. No two-bit Ayatollahs are gonna milk the Great Satan at the pump; no tin-pot pan-Arabist; no neo-communists; no nobody.

Of course, our continual intervention in the hopes of preventing these impediments is the principle catalyst for their genesis. In reality, if we just left the poor bastards alone—or if we had left them alone, anyway—we’d probably be in decent shape. What, after all, is their incentive to deny the world’s wealthiest nation a product it desperately wants to buy? As Jim wrote: all you need to ensure access to a commodity is a functioning market.

It is, unfortunately, too late to put the coups and revolutions and invasions and interventions back in the bottle. That’s why it will be necessary to consider and to enact fundamental changes in the geographic organization of our communities. Oil production almost surely will decline, and even if not, fifty years of ill-considered meddling by an American government that mistakenly considered such meddling essential to its domestic economy has led inexorably to a situation where not even immediate and total disengagement would lead to a practicable trade environment. We’re fucked so far as that’s concerned, at least for the foreseeable future.

So long as we persist in our disproportionate consumption of energy, and so long as the delusion persists that we cannot secure access to energy without securing air-bases near the oil-fields—and who, honestly, thinks anyone in power will be disabused of that delusion anytime soon—adventurism and imperialism in the Middle East are unavoidable outcomes. I am not certain, needless to say, of the best manner to divest ourselves of oil dependency on a scale sufficient to affect our national foreign policy. I think that investing in urban development and urban real estate is a good way to start. I think that supporting regional agriculture as a consumer is also a good way to start. I think that so long as we depend on government investment in transportation infrastructure, we should advocate as forcefully as possible for public transportation infrastructure for several good reasons aside from reduced energy use. It’s cheaper to build. The cost of a single highway interchange could fund thirty miles of light rail. It’s less invasive to the natural geography of a community. Compare the impact of a light rail line, a new bus route, or a subway to that of a new highway. Because such development requires less land, it involves less eminent domain; it involves fewer neighborhoods carved up by six lanes and sound barriers. And, of course, public transit, if utilized, is less tax-dependent in the long-run because it self-subsidizes with fees and fares.

All of this is terribly small compared to the forces driving the American military around the world in search of . . . whatever. But nevertheless . . .

You Must Change Your Life

Max speak. You listen:

That the Bush Administration assumes a more rational cast on foreign policy is no reason to let up on them. "Realism" in foreign policy still reflects an unacceptable premise of U.S. intrusiveness in the affairs of other nations, historically often fraught with horrific violence. After all, the famous Rummy handshake with Saddam and U.S. machinations in the Iraq-Iran conflict, entailing war crimes that are the basis of Hussein's death sentence, was an exercise in realism. Realism is still imperialism, without the crazy messianic face.

Emphasis mine.

But why stop there? It's been an article of faith among the self-nominated antiwar wing of the Democratic party that a not-so-secret junta of millennarian neoconservatives, headed up by the death-cultist-in-chief, have been driving the pickup truck along a winding, messianic road. But the Secretary of Defense was an old hand, not a world-ender. So too the Vice President. So too the first Secretary of State. And let's not forget that the dauphin's secret Rasputin wasn't Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz or a Kagan or a Kristol. It was that old reptile Kissinger. Who rose from a coffin filled with the soil of his homeland and pronounced himself a realist, whatever on earth that meant in the long decades between Hanoi and Halabja. The antiwar Dems believe the opposition's press releases even as they call them lies. They believe that the American military lumbered into the Middle East in order to act out some PNAC white paper fantasy, giving exactly the undeserved credence to the Weekly Standard crowd that none of them deserve.

Atrios of Eschaton often writes that he still doesn't understand why we went to war in Iraq. That common confusion rests on an epistemological error. There's nothing to gain by seeking some ultimate reason distilled from six years of public yapping and private grousing about the war by the hangers-on-to-power. The Iraq war is the continuation of a policy of so-called realism that existed long before our current conflict.

We invaded Iraq to rectify the failure of prior policies of realism. Remember that Iraq under Hussein was largely constructed as an American pseudo-client state, reasonably tractible if occasionally unpredictable, which came to particular importance after some more American realism brought us the Iranian Revolution. We invaded Iraq because our policy of playing Iran and Iraq against one another during their long, bloody war eventually fell apart and because Hussein got too big for his britches. We invaded Iraq because after the First Gulf War and a decade of containment, a decision was made to reconstitute an actual client state in the Middle East with a government reasonably friendly to the United States and a lot of empty land for a permanent military presence. It was realism that brought us Iraq, despite all the democracy-building hullabaloo. It was realism about the delicacy of America's energy situation and the necessity of having a force capable of protecting the delicate arterial oil-web that runs every aspect of American society. Nevermind that every time we try to create a client state in the region, we get fucked. Nevermind. We invaded because the writing is on the wall, the Chinese are buying more cars, and the realists--Cheney, Rumsfeld, Kissinger--recognized that the status quo in the region was a poor position for American access to energy assets. (In a stroke of irony, the new Rumsfeld was a player in Iran-Contra.)

The Democrats are busy telling the American people that they will invest more in electric cars, or some such. The American people are too stupid to understand that we invaded Iraq because of them and their non-negotiable way of life. That's realism. We invaded Iraq because the easy-motoring, easy-credit lifestyle consumes too much energy, depends on plastics and pharmaceuticals, eats out on petrochemically-fertilized food. We didn't invade Iraq to steal their oil. We invaded Iraq to put a dusty boot down in the Middle East and establish a foil against other energy users just as we once tried to establish foils against the Soviets. It wasn't the Apocalypse. It was just business.

Realism is imperialism for a reason. Money. Resources. Influence. Democrats enjoyed a fine honeymoon when they could rail against the utopian dreams of PNAC neocons and bullshit claims about nuclear weapons. Neither ever had anything to do with anything, anymore than Kate Moss has something to do with whether or not your fat ass will fit into those skinny jeans. We aren't leaving Iraq because no politician will say to the America of the Automobile and the Chicken Nugget:

Du mußt dein Leben andern

Bomb Rahm.

"No!" say the gals at Firedoglake, ostensibly in response to their party bigwigs already yapping to the media: not-to-worry, we're not gonna do nothin' crazy. Or, in the thunderous prose of Christy Hardin Smith:

Let me get this straight, we have just taken back the House and, looking more likely as of this morning, the Senate, and Rahm's first priority is to shore up his power base and his ties to K Street.

Goodness, but they do stamp their feet. The Democratic Party is a huge, money-drinking corporate entity, so of course its first order of business is to reward the folks who write the bills (and the Bills), to keep the loud-mouth populism to a minimum now that the populus has had its say. Rank-and-file Democrats are like nothing so much as congregants who imagine their role in the call-and-response portion of the liturgy means that they're running the service.

The foot-stomping continues:

And I'm here to tell you right now that Henry Waxman had better be sitting in that committee chairman's seat overseeing the rampant war profiteering oversight, or there is going to be a world of shit headed directly at a certain ballet-dancer-turned-self-promoter's head. Some principles should not be sacrificed — and allowing big companies to steal from the federal government because you are hoping they will donate to your campaign coffers is not — I repeat NOT — acceptable. Period. So cross that off the list if it's there, it is non-negotiable.

If you think for a moment that those of us who just worked our asses off for a win are simply going to roll over and say thank you when you spit on us, you can think again.

I'm sure that's got Rahm Emmanuel and company all a-quiver. Of what mechanism, precisely, will the villagers avail themselves in this quest to right the wrongs perpetrated upon their honor? Yo, Christy, you've already voted. What're you gonna do, stay home in aught-eight? Your armory is empty, baby, and it's Rahm, the War Party, and the Credit Card industry who won this round, as they win every round, because they have influence and access, while you've got a loud-mouthed rabble who, in the end, always act predictably, always hold your nose, and always give the Complex what it wants. Don't tense your back. The shiv will slide in a lot easier if you just relax.

I ask myself: How well-attended will the next antiwar march on Washington be, what with the Dems happily jiggering the levers of power? Within the next few months, the Democratic party line will move along to smarter fighting, better occupation, more troops, timelines for those backwards Iraqis to get their shit in order. The firebreathing "antiwar" democratic blogs, meanwhile, will make like Echo and repeat the party line, since dissent might lead in two years to defeat. Like Echo, they're cursed by their own idolatrous longings. And who do you suppose that makes the Dems, you mythologists?

Plus ça change

Well, the Defeat-O-Crats® sure whomped on 'em last night, didn't they? What can we expect from our once and future kings?

Early Democratic priorities will include raising the minimum wage, boosting homeland security spending, shifting the nation's energy policy away from oil and gas exploration toward alternative fuel sources, and reversing cuts to education spending.

Oh my stars and garters!

Notably absent is any talk of Iran, and what little mention there is of Israel falls under the "Israel is Awesome" column. John Dingell and Waxman the Taxman promise investigations into "waste and mismanagement" in the Iraq war, and there is much cooing over the subpoena power now active and uncoiling from the anal chakra of the National Democratic Party. Then again, Howard Dean is out in California yapping that the Donkle hasn't much chance of altering the president's actual policy. The Democrats rode high on troop-love to get into office, promsing more money and better equipment, so we can hardly expect them to cut off money to the boys in the field and force the dauphin to pull his army men off the board and bring their real-world counterparts back home. Investigating so-called mismanagement is all fine and well, but does it not imply that the project itself, if better managed, would have been (and might still be) a worthwhile endeavor?

Nevertheless, in the spirit of charity and comity, I will say that although I don't support the Democrats and don't imagine that their victory will amount to much beyond a marginally more tempered bellicosity and exceptionalism emenating from the hallowed halls of Congress, I do share in the schadenfreudenous glee of any non-column American in seeing that gang of crooked malcontents booted into a modest minority. It may be style over substance, and it may be immaterial in the end, but the unibrowed face of Bob Casey grinning in the papers as he advocates for blastocysts and imperial wars against our terrorist enemies will be a welcome relief from the boyish architecture of the Santorum façade, ever-present, as he advocated for precisely the same.

The Donkle and the Oliphant

Who shall or will or might or can't?
The Donkle? Or the Oliphant?

If I'm elected, Donkle cries,
The working man shall reap the prize,
his wage will grow before his eyes
unless he meets his sad demise
on some imperial reprise
of policies the Donks despise
but vote for anyway, surprise!
He trusts before he verifies.

Ha ha! cries Oliphant in turn
it's better marry straight than burn
or risk a Donk-desired return
of Saddam's nuclear-inspector-spurn,
although the public calls us bums,
and thinks we spin on Haggard's thumbs
and serve a preternaturally dumb
President, we say: we've won!
And even if we haven't won
the Donkle's too weak for the scrum
of lawyered pandemonium:
In short, we've won, we've won, we've won!

Between the two the public waits
and softly, gently masturbates
upon whichever side he hates
for failing to respond, relate,
express, ally, appreciate
expend, expound, expediate,
by November seven's fateful date,
by telling Just Folks that they're great
a people chosen out by fate,
all history's premier nation-state,
no matter who supplies the cant
the Donkle, or the Oliphant.

Hangman

At one of the last meetings of Allied leaders before the constitution of the Nuremburg tribunal, Churchill apocryphally averred that Nazi leaders should be summarily shot when captured. Stalin, also apocryphally, responded with Titanic sanctimony: "In the Soviet Union, we do not execute anyone without a trial."

"Of course, of course," said Churchill, "We should give them trials before we shoot them."

We can surely put to rest the question of whether or not the Saddam verdict was timed to influence elections in the United States. As it turns out, there is not, in fact, a verdict; merely a sentence, with the conviction to be filled in ASAP.

That couldn't stop the dauphin, who flew to the first available microphone to laud the historic milestone, the turning point, the signal moment, the transition "from the rule of a tyrant to the rule of law," though what law precisely will have to wait until the Iraqi High Tribunal lets us know--once again, ASAP. No actual evidence from Iraq suggests a functioning judiciary, less yet a functioning civil police force, nor even a military effectively organized for martial law. Conservatives have come to believe their own hyperboles about judges; they see the judicial foundations of a society located entirely in special courts and appellate jurisdictions. Functionally, of course, Iraqi society has no need of supreme tribunals and constitutional courts. It needs effective police and independent civil and criminal courts.

The reason the American revolution focused on The Big Questions was that the small ones were mostly settled. We already had a functional economy. We already had municipal courts and local governments. We already had schools and jails and transportation infrastructure. We already had banks and farms and shops. We had over 150 years since Jamestown.

But these basic truths have never much impressed the revolutionary dreamers of today's Missionary America. They believe that America was hewn out the wilderness with willpower alone, and all at once in 1776.

So, in Iraq, a national assembly and a bullshit supreme court signal to them Success--such paradigmatic success that it entirely eclipses the inexhaustible daily failures of the Occupation. Military tribunals conducted in garrisons (and, given the number of assassinated participants . . . well) don't indicate a society of laws and not men; they indicate only that enough barbed wire enables this or that discrete process to go forward. Traffic courts and small claims trials existing without fear of executed judges and kidnapped defendants show rule of law. All else is propoganda.

I don't know what effect, if any, the verdict will have on our domestic politics, and needless to say I don't expect that it will make a substantive difference one way or other. Democrats are as enthralled to the Troops-imago as their cross-aisle collaborators, and when the Decider defies their weak calls for withdrawal, they won't defy him. Instead, you'll hear a lot more talk about Bush's failure, a campaign issue for 2008, already just around the corner. Americans and Iraqis will continue to die, but by god, burger flippers are gonna get seven bucks an hour. Or bust!